Casey Kasem: The Voice of Rock and Roll

The late Casey Kasem—like Howard Cosell, Paul Harvey, or the movie-trailer king Hal Douglas—had one of the great voices of American broadcasting. It was wholesome, peppy, a little showbiz, with a timbre and cadences that were instantly recognizable and universally understood. His voice meant that you were in the hands of a rock-and-roll professional of the old school.

On Kasem’s four-hour weekly countdown show, “American Top 40,” his persona wasn’t that of a fellow-fan, like Wolfman Jack or Kool D.J. Red Alert or Martha Quinn. Unconcerned by cool, and possibly unaware of what cool was, he was a clean-cut, sweater-wearing authority, somewhere between disc jockey and anchorman, who could present KISS, Marvin Gaye, Toni Basil, the Oak Ridge Boys, or Color Me Badd as equally valid acts, by virtue of their presence on the Top Forty charts. His show was democratic, a great leveller; by virtue of being there, pop acts could seem either safer or more exciting, and they rose and fell—holding steady at No. 1, sliding sixteen spots down to No. 30, leaping up to No. 4—with time and fluctuations of fandom, yesterday’s hits making way for today’s, Kasem reporting it all like breaking news.

Kasem, born Kemal Amen Kasem, grew up in Detroit, the son of Lebanese immigrant grocers. In 1970, after college, time in the army, and working in local radio in Los Angeles, he started doing his countdown show; it ran for thirty-four years. The show both glamorized and familiarized the Top Forty, connecting people to the artists they loved in innocent, often goofy ways. He’d include little biographical details about the artists (“Coming up is a New Wave band whose three dark-haired members all dyed their hair blond—not to be far-out, but to get jobs in a chewing-gum commercial!” was how he once introduced the Police) that helped them seem like regular people. He referred to “Starting Over,” by John Lennon and Yoko Ono, in terms unburdened by Beatles fandom: it was simply a “huge smash.” In the show’s signature feature, the Long-Distance Dedication, Kasem connected listeners to each other via a letter read aloud, a pop song, and his voice, dedicating, for example, Mr. Mister’s “Broken Wings” from a woman to her selfless older sister. (“This one goes halfway around the world, from Malaysia to Oklahoma…”)

Kasem brought safety and familiarity to music that wasn’t always distinguished by those things; his voice itself was central to that familiarity. For kids of my era, it was a voice we already knew and loved, often without realizing it; Kasem was the voice of Shaggy on “Scooby-Doo” and of Alexander Cabot III on “Josie and the Pussycats” (here, he plays both, and does the voice-over intro) and of Robin on “Batman” and “Superfriends.” (Here, on “Sesame Street,” Batman and Robin teach us about the dangers of jaywalking: “Holy manhole!”) On “Scooby-Doo” he was always scared, like I was, of all the trouble the gang got itself into; on his countdowns, he was a straight, square mediator between you and rock and roll.

For young people in the seventies and eighties, especially, “American Top 40” was a bridge between the music played at home, or on local radio, and the wider world of current pop. Kasem’s focus on these songs being popular coast to coast, all across the country, was part of the appeal. After I started listening to FM radio on my own, at the age of seven or so, I’d form allegiances to songs—”Queen of Hearts,” “I Love a Rainy Night,” “9 to 5”—and sing them while jumping on my bed, or request them at the roller rink; on Sundays, I’d tune in to Casey Kasem and find out how they ranked in the countdown. The ritual made loving the songs that much more thrilling.

When “Private Eyes,” by Hall & Oates, came out, it sounded very modern to me; it was a little more badass, with its mild aggression and its threat of surveillance, than what I normally listened to, and it felt like a phenomenon. The week it seemed to take over everyone’s consciousness, I tuned in to “American Top Forty” on my parents’ stereo in the living room, anxiously waiting to see where it would rank. As Kasem made his way through the Top Ten, it wasn’t there and wasn’t there until it was—No. 1!—and I ran in circles around the room, singing and dancing and not believing my ears. Kasem’s show and his countdown made me feel like a part of it, as if my love of it had helped make it No. 1. His voice—its kindness and warmth—and his show, of the pop songs that Americans loved best, made democracy, capitalism, entertainment, and happiness come together, treating British punks and New York club kids and Philly soul acts and Detroit arena-rockers as equals, hitmakers, accessible to all.